This is the second blog post in my new DotNetNuke blog series and it’s about a problem I found out when saving TabModuleSettings in my custom module.

Generally, saving ModuleSettings and TabModuleSettings in DotNetNuke is very straightforward: The DotNetNuke.Entities.Modules.ModuleController offers two simple update methods:

• UpdateModuleSetting(int ModuleId, string SettingName, string SettingValue) for updating ModuleSettings and
• UpdateTabModuleSetting(int tabModuleId, string settingName, string settingValue) for updating TabModuleSettings.

My code to update TabModuleSettings looks as follows:

var settingName = typeof(MyType).ToString(); // Create unique setting name
var moduleController = new ModuleController();
moduleController.UpdateTabModuleSetting(module.TabModuleId, settingName, settingValue);

This code seems to works fine, but I was not able to get the the settings back from the module’s TabModuleSettings Hashtable. After some research I found out, that DotNetNuke truncates setting names to 50 characters (I used the full qualified name of my class which exceeds the 50 characters limit to create a unique setting name). As far as I understand the framework, the reason is that the columns [SettingName] in the tables [TabModuleSettings] and [ModuleSettings] are defined as [nvarchar](50).

IMHO, the DotNetNuke should throw an ArgumentException if one uses an invalid setting name. As long as this is not the case, keep this limitation in mind when creating setting names…